“... turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary megalomaniac (first as president of Boston University and then as failed gubernatorial candidate), was at that point a brilliant and progressive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also brought in by Ransom. The ...”

“... striking departure from conventional fiction writing is Quin’s use of quotation, which becomes a major, if invisible strand in Tripticks but appears first in Three when S writes, ‘All afternoon surrounded, exchanging newspapers. I came across the following …’ and follows it with two pages of almost verbatim quotation from a 1966 article about the ...”

“... I recently discovered that Aigas House is now home to the nature writer and rewilding advocate Sir John Lister-Kaye, who has restored the building to its Scots baronial glory. Aigas is now a field centre, an ecotourism business and the site of two experimental programmes: a Beaver Demonstration Project and a captive Wildcat Conservation Breeding ...”

“... Meanwhile, plenty of other countries might also have been classed as ‘pandemoniums’, to use John Milton’s newly minted word. France endured regicide and rebellion and the Holy Roman Empire lost perhaps five million lives to the Thirty Years’ War. Nothing in England was comparable to the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. Jackson anticipates and deflects ...”

“... of a scruple that finds its red line somewhere between marriage and the marriage bed. (Yes, John Ruskin, but this, we’re given to understand, was Vollman’s second wife.) What’s really odd is Vollman’s need to explain a 19th-century wedding in terms meant to flatter a 21st-century sensibility. When Vollman says: ‘I know what you are ...”

“... fact: the mind prefers narratives to numbers.Kahneman and Tversky’s research began to have a major impact outside psychology after the publication in 1979 of their work on ‘prospect theory’. There they argued that people were more concerned with change than with current states – with gaining and losing money rather than having a particular level of ...”

“... state created by the New Deal to the stripped-down neoliberal state of our own time. And a major advance in public health was accomplished through the mobilisation of a parsimonious social vision. This wasn’t just a tale of heroes and villains.It’s hard to lament the demise of the smoky world of the mid-20th century. The anti-smoking crusade of the ...”

“... The Ancient Paths was not so revolutionary. It belongs squarely to a tradition dating back to John Toland’s History of the Druids. Toland, who seems to have invented the term ‘pantheism’, believed he had uncovered ‘the philosophy of the Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, but died ...”

“... about their popularity with paedophiles, and their central role in paedophile activity, this is a major distortion, especially in Dr Li’s explorations of the subjective worlds of his 20 abusers. The clear implication of Tim Tate’s book would be, indeed, either that some of Dr Li’s subjects were less than truthful about their dependence on child ...”

“... at Manderley whom she also called Robert. The fortunes of Moper, who at this stage had risen to be Major-General Sir Frederick Browning, in fact provide some of the most interesting parts of the book. (He had other nicknames, acquired before his marriage, but they were neither strained nor foolish: one was Boy, to distinguish him from his father who was also a ...”

“... A subtler, and more economical, exercise in revisionism was performed by the Melbourne historian John Hirst in Convict Society and its Enemies (1983). Hirst studied the early history of New South Wales, intent on understanding how a penal colony had changed into a free society. As he stripped away the anti-transportation campaigners’ caricatures and ...”

“... much to criticise in the way the Government is treating the universities. It must bear a major share of the blame for the recent impasse. But the exam boycott was wrong in principle and wrong in practice, and wrong in practice because wrong in principle. The Vice-Chancellors, whatever tactical errors they may have committed, are not 19th-century ...”

“... pages of rebuttal only this time under Burt’s name. The second example dates from 1963, when John McLeish’s book The Science of Behaviour charged (almost a decade before Kamin) that Burt had inadequately described his twin studies, and called his research methodology ‘shocking’. Burt promptly ran a scathing and nitpicking review, three times longer ...”

“... greeted enthusiastically abroad, did the French public become aware that they had a historian of major importance among them. It was only when a television series was made about his work that he became a national figure. At the Collège de France, he was outside the university system. At the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (the defiantly modern monument he ...”

“... The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but concentrates on the inter-generational conflicts between Burden and Blaise and their respective children. From time to time a famous politician ...”